Green week and the household dressed in leaves

In early summer, at the festival that falls fifty days after Easter, Ukrainian houses are decorated with cut greenery: branches of birch, lime or maple at the doorway and windows, and aromatic herbs scattered across the floor.

What is actually being done

The church festival is Pentecost. What is practised in households is older and only loosely attached to it.

The greenery brings the outside in at the moment of maximum growth, which is a fertility gesture of a kind found across the continent. The herbs on the floor are trodden, crushed and fill the house with scent for several days, then swept and often kept.

The part about the dead

This period is also strongly associated with the dead, and specifically with those who died in an irregular way — young, unmarried, drowned, before their time. In folk belief these are the people who do not settle, and the green week is when they are near.

That is why several of the associated practices are protective, and why in some regions this is a week for avoiding rivers and lakes.

It is also why the greenery goes on the doorway, which is where a threshold is.

Why the layers do not conflict

Because nobody experiences them as separate. A household putting branches at the door on Pentecost is doing one thing, not two, and would not recognise the description of it as a survival inside a church holiday.

That is how these layers persist: not preserved deliberately, but simply never separated in the first place.

That the layers do not conflict is something I have met repeatedly in this archive, and for somebody who came from outside it is the most surprising part. Where I come from there are days like that too — nobody asks which layer a thing arrived from. I cannot explain the part being described; but two traditions standing on the same day is not foreign to me.